The Team

Founders of Stand Up for Nature, Hannah Pollock and Jamie Unwin

We are Hannah Pollock and Jamie Unwin, two young Zoologists, film makers and National Geographic Explorers.

In 2014 we successfully completed a self-generated expedition to a never before studied forest in Madagascar. We were told that we were too young but we managed to prove ourselves to the Royal Geographic Society who then supported the expedition. We realised that with a bit of drive and motivation, a lot of things are possible.

Later that year Jamie gained the support of Sony to help him make a film in Malawi and this was when we discovered that a lot of people all across Africa had never seen a lot of their world famous wildlife. We wanted to use films to inspire people in Malawi about wildlife but we needed a way of showing the film! Not being able to afford to buy a bicycle-powered cinema we designed and built our own. So during our 2015 university Christmas holidays we headed back to Malawi and led our first ever Bicycle-powered cinema project down the entire length of the country, working with 21 different partners, we managed to show 14,000 people the film in just 6 weeks.

Throughout 2016 we continued to develop our filming skills and worked on various films, including a one for the BBC One Show.

Graduating from university in 2017 with degrees in Zoology we headed straight to Kenya for our biggest bicycle-cinema project yet, our dream had been building momentum over our last year at uni and we had managed to gain support from National Geographic, The Scientific Exploration Society and the Explorers Club. We wanted to take a risk and produce the first ever extensive series of local language films about local unsung heroes and then show these to people living in human-wildlife conflict hotspots. We went on a 6 month long adventure and found people doing incredible things, from a man who habituated himself into a troop of baboons to a boy who hand-reared a baby buffalo! Showing these films throughout Kenya showed us how impactful these projects could be, we had people living around the Maasai Mara telling us they had never seen some of the wildlife in our films!
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We both share an incredible passion for the natural world and Stand Up for Nature is our way of standing up for the causes we feel so strongly about.

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Jamie Unwin
Camera operator, Director, Producer and Zoologist. 

"I’ve always felt helpless in the face of all the depressing news regarding the plight of planets environment and it inhabitants. I was incredibly fortunate to travel to Malawi in 2015 as it opened my eyes to conservation and made me realise, that it’s certainly not impossible to help our diminishing wildlife populations. Coupling my scientific background with wildlife filming has enabled me to target what I feel so most passionate about; wildlife crime and human wildlife conflict issues."

Hannah Pollock
Zoologist, Researcher, Camera Operator

"I've had a love of wildlife and the natural world for as long as I can remember and all I've ever wanted to do was be able to make a difference. Putting this together with my passion for travel and admiration of other cultures creating 'Stand Up for Nature' has enabled me to invest my time in something I truly believe in. Using education to hopefully bring about cultural change in a healthy way to ensure the conservation of our planets wildlife! The support we've had from so many inspirational people and organisations has been overwhelming I can't wait to see what happens next!"

Meet Hannah and Jamie as they follow Elk and Mule Deer in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, USA